A judge has prohibited wide swathes of information, including raunchy portions from the debunked Steele dossier on Donald Trump’s alleged sexual escapades in Moscow, from being brought up at the Danchenko trial.
In an 18-page order issued ahead of the trial, which is set to start Tuesday at the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia to determine whether Danchenko consciously lied to the FBI, Judge Anthony J. Trenga moved to expunge materials which Special Counsel John Durham sought to have included in the trial. Key among them is the notorious claim that Russian intelligence had secretly filmed a "pee tape" of Trump partying with Russian prostitutes who urinated on a bed in front of him at a Moscow Ritz Carlton hotel room in 2013.
Durham sought to include the claims, which were fed by Danchenko to Steele, as a demonstration of the defendant’s propensity to make false statements. Trenga wrote that including such evidence would be “substantially outweighed by the danger” that it might confuse the jury and cast “unfair prejudice” against Mr. Danchenko.
Certain facts “do not qualify as direct evidence as they are not ‘inextricably intertwined’ or ‘necessary to provide context’ to the relevant charge,” the judge ruled.
The judge further ordered that other materials, including evidence pertaining to Danchenko’s alleged false statements about disclosing his work to Steele, as well as an email from Danchenko seemingly encouraging a former employer to fabricate sources, to similarly be withheld from the case.
Trenga also approved a request by Danchenko’s lawyers to withhold details of the FBI’s investigation into allegations that the defendant sought to facilitate the sale of classified information and that he had contacts with Russian intelligence services.
“The probative value of these unproven allegations, i.e. Danchenko sought to facilitate the sale of classified information and that he had contact with Russian intelligence services, which would have to be established through multiple levels of hearsay, is of only marginal relevance in terms of proving the materiality of Danchenko’s allegedly false statements. The evidence’s low probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice and confusion of the issues,” Trenga wrote.
The judge further swore to withhold arguments, evidence or testimony of government witnesses if they were deemed to make Danchenko’s prosecution appear “politically motivated.”
“Whether such evidence would be admissible cannot be determined at this time and the Court will rule on specific issues if and when this type of evidence is sought to be presented at trial,” he wrote.
Liberal-leaning media including The New York Times and NBC News cast the judge’s order as a major blow for Durham in undermining the significance of Danchenko’s trial, with the Durham inquiry’s grand jury expiring last month, apparently indicating that no further charges are forthcoming in his multi-year probe into the origins of the FBI’s "Trump-Russia collusion" investigation, Crossfire Hurricane.
Durham’s investigation led to the conviction of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith in early 2021 after the latter pleaded guilty to altering an email related to the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The FBI used the uncorroborated information provided by Danchenko in the Steele Dossier to begin its surveillance of Page.
Christopher Steele’s private intelligence company compiled the infamous opposition research file for the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, with the 17-memo dossier alleging “extensive conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin,” that Trump and Russia funded teams of hackers to sabotage the election, that the hacking was partly funded by the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, that Trump secretly received anti-Democratic Party intelligence from Moscow, and that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen secretly visited Prague in 2016 to meet with aides to Vladimir Putin to cover up the conspiracy.
All of these allegations and more were debunked by the Mueller Report – a comprehensive 400+ page document released in April 2019 after a three-year probe into suspected Russian interference in the 2016 election. The report found no evidence of any collusion between Trump and the Kremlin.
As recently as late 2021, Steele insisted that he continues to “stand by the work” he did in putting together the dossier, his “professionalism,” and his sources. Notwithstanding overwhelming evidence that his report was a fabrication, and despite the damage it helped cause to Russia-US relations, Steele has never been held legally liable for his work.